Try buying a sack of amaranth seed from the health food store and planting those. You get a lot more seeds that way and still have plenty leftover to eat after planting unless you plan to plant acres of it. I've heard that the blond colored seeds are better eating than the black colored seeds. Its my understanding that the yellow headed varieties produce the blonde colored seeds. I grew amaranth for the first time this year and it was a red headed variety with black seeds. I didn't get enough seeds to eat but got more than enough to plant a huge patch next year. The leaves were good after steaming, very similar in texture to spinach. Very few bugs bothered my plants but mice did start to dig into the seed heads after the bulk of the seeds matured. Don't wait to harvest! Spiders liked hanging out in the protection of the seed heads. They will grow in poor soil and may get 3 foot tall - like mine did. But you can get monster sized plants with huge seed heads in good soil with plenty of water. I found they companion plant with beans well whether viney or bush type but the beans do attract pests. Threshing the seed heads is a lot of work but winnowing is dead easy. You'd think that with the seeds so small they'd blow with the chaff but the chaff is so light that just a puff of air from you is enough to blow it off. I winnow using a plastic gold panning pan.

We`ve grown a couple of kinds for the last few years. The first time on purpose and the second time as volunteers all over the garden. The seed is quite a bit of trouble to separate from the chaff. Might have to just eat it all. Some of the plants are over six feet tall. I guessed that some of the big ones might yield as much as two cups of seed. The greens taste like pigweed, which is what they are. I think lamb`s quarters tastes better. The pigweeds have a little soapy taste and make my throat feel raw. I`ll look around and see if there are any seeds or seedlings around here, if so I`ll bring you some at the Raleigh swap. See you soon!!! Bob and Dawn

Bt 'kurstaki' is the best organic remedy I have found for any and all kinds of caterpillers, except maybe for cutworms and other caterpillars that spend some time underground as a part of their life cycle or their daily life. (With those, I've found Slug-Go Plus very effective.) If a product with Bt 'kurstaki' is not effective for you, you can step up to one of the other organic pesticides containing pyrethrin or spinosad. The problem with those two pesticides is that they will kill a lot of other insects, including your beneficial insects that help keep your pest insects under control. For that reason, I never spray them on my entire garden, although I might spray them directly on a specific plant or two that has a major insect problem. With any pest, I always start with the least invasive form of control, like hand-picking, and then step up to a narrow-spectrum pesticide that only affects the pest (like Bt 'kurstaki', for example). If the situation cannot be controlled with those, a person can use organic pesticides that cover a wider spectrum of pests, but I don't like using those because I depend a great deal on my beneficial insects to control my garden's pest insects. I try to garden for the butterflies and plant oodles of plants for them, not just for adult butterflies but also to nourish the caterpillars, so it is a rare occasion that I'll use Bt 'kurstaki' at all, and when I do, I use it only on the specific plants (usually broccoli and cabbage plants) that are being damaged and am extremely careful not to let it drift on to nearby butterfly flowers. One problem with loopers is that they do like lots of other plants and will devour those too. That includes spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens, potato and tomato plants, and cucumber plants. (I mean regular cucumber---I'm not sure I've ever seen them on Armenian cucumbers, but those are really melons and not cukes.) I try to control cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms by handpicking them every day and dropping them into a bowl of soapy water to drown. I used to take them and throw them to the chickens, but our chickens are either lazy or too well-fed, because when I toss caterpillars in their chicken run, they mostly look up at me with an expression that says "I am not gonna eat that" and then they walk away and I have to go into the chicken run and kill the loopers myself----so I save myself the trouble of trying to feed them to the chickens by drowning them. Then, I dump the dead loopers onto the compost pile where they can decompose into compost that someday will feed my garden plants. If hand-picking them is not an option and you'd rather not spray pesticides in the garden, your next best bet is to buy trichogramma wasps and release them in your garden. This is a good option only if you do not spray pesticides in your garden. There's not point in releasing beneficial insects if you're going to turn around and kill them. There are many other kinds of loopers, so it could be you have one of those and not that cabbage loopers. I'm pretty sure the loopers I have found devouring my cleome plants were cabbage loopers, but it could be they are just some other looper than looks similar. One of my favorite early-season ways to control them actually involves controlling the moths. When I first start seeing their moths, which in recent years has been in March or even in February, I put a few yellow Tidy Cat litter buckets filled with alfalfa tea in the garden and also near any lights that remain on all night long. You make alfalfa tea the same way you make compost tea only by soaking some alfalfa (instead of compost), like rabbit feed pellets made of compressed alfalfa, for example, in water for a few hours. Those moths flock to those buckets of alfalfa tea (and so do the June bugs which normally are April bugs here), and I have a lot of dead looper moths floating on the surface of the alfalfa tea every morning. I scoop them out so their dead bodies won't be some sort of warning to other looper moths, and have more floating in there the next day. This is not something I use long-term. I just use it for a few days when the moths first appear. If I leave it out later on as the weather warms up more, I tend to find bees and other beneficials in there, which just horrifies me. Then, I call it a year and pour the alfalfa tea on some plants that need a good feeding. Keeping tall grass mowed short helps keep the hopper population down right now. I try to keep the grass outside the garden mowed pretty short, but there's nothing I can do about adjacent pastures that do not belong to us. Later on, in July and August when huge hordes of hoppers migrate into the still-green areas from dried out pastures and grasslands, mowing isn't that effective. Grasshoppers are so mobile that no matter what you do, more just keep moving in. I got a huge education in grasshopper behavior and grasshopper control our first few years here when we had drought and the population was huge. Grasshopper control is difficult at best, but most easily done when they are young and small. Once they are big, you're only going to have luck with vacuuming them up. Been there. Done that. Hate doing it. I hate grasshoppers more, though.

Yes, I learned about the Moringa tree and they have it in Haiti. The Creole name is Dolive. The missionaries in the N/W Haiti have experimented with Moringa leaf powder. It is packed with much needed vitamins. The Haitians seem a little reluctant to eat the leaves because they are a little bitter but a few mixed in with the other greens in their legim are not noticed and add lots of vitamins. On the new crops, they love the mustard, collard greens, and quail grss since they are similiar to other plants they eat. Also, the Tropical Pumpkin was a perfect fit since they love squash. The African Okra is a good replacement for their local okra since it is more heat and drought resistant and produces heavily from April until the severe drought in December. Our carrot is the Red Core which is a short fat carrot and the common Detroit Red beet works pretty good also. They eat both the beet and top. They have several good beans and I really like the pwa congo or congo pea. It is a short shrub that produces for 2 to 4 years and also returns nitrogen to the soil. The soil in northwestern Haiti is very poor. The area is covered with coral and quite often only pockets of soil are available to be planted. Often soft limestone is covered with an inch or so of soil. Here we dug pot holes about 30 inches wide and 30 inches deep and filled them with a mixture of compost, crushed donkey manure, and sifted dirt. Bananas, yams, and other plants do really well in these holes. Northwestern Haiti is extremely poor and isolated by bad roads. A trip from Port au Prince of about 140 miles can take as long as 18 hours. A good trip is about 10 hours. There is no government help. Natural disasters, AIDS, and other medical problems take their toll. Water supply is often polluted and limited. I believe that if Haiti had clean water and good food that 2/3 of the medical problems would disappear. Throw into the mix various opportunist and not the best leaders and you have a real mess. Sorry, I got to rambling on. Right now we are working with a few missionaries there supplying seed, expertise, and materials to help the local gardeners. Occasionally we have a little money to help with disasters such as the last series of huricanes. By spreading the work among others more progress can be made. And we know the help we send will get to the ones who need it.